Tips, Ideas and Nutrition Information
for Healthful and Sustainable Living
With Amira Elgan
Take charge of your health -- and your life -- and find out what it really means to be healthy.
I will provide useful, practical and empowering information about health, nutrition and organic living that will put you in control of your own well-being.
Eating a healthy, well-balanced diet will give you the energy to live an active and productive lifestyle. Health is the foundation to a long and happy life.
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Your Mental Environment and Wellbeing Your mental environment affects your overall wellbeing. By definition, your “environment”– your immediate surroundings, is everything around you that affects you as a living organism.
Your environment – your home, office, car, etc. – affects your body constantly and directly. Your body responds to your environment on many levels by making adjustments in bodily function with hormones and other chemical processes, which obviously affect health.
High-pressure jobs, demanding bosses, overloaded schedules, long commutes, bad traffic, financial problems, etc., are contributing factors to the high level of stress we experience everyday.
Some stress in certain situations is good because it is what motivates us to leap into action. Too much stress, however, can cause emotional imbalance and health problems. High levels of stress cause our brains to release toxins and chemicals that pollute our bodies and can have negative effects, including muscle tension, hair loss, ulcers, impotence and heart disease.
We can’t totally eliminate stress from our lives. But we can learn to moderate it and even prevent it by being aware of our thinking processes and mental state.
It’s not an overnight process—it’s an ongoing practice. The first step is identifying what pushes our buttons. We all have peculiar things that set us off more easily causing us to feel more aggravated than we normally would and leading us to over-react and behave irrationally. Self-awareness can help us modify the way we think about things and adopt a more positive point of view. It also helps us exercise more self-control because we learn to think before we react.
Second, learning to accept that we don’t control others – we can only control ourselves – is an important aspect of letting go. And while we can try changing environmental factors that affect our level of stress, we should not expect to be able to control them. By changing the way we look at things, we can dramatically reduce the toll taken by stress. For example, we can’t control the abusive driver that tailgates us on the highway, but we can control how we react. We can burn with anger and feel threatened and insulted, or we can simply accept that tailgaters exist and not fret about it. The safest and healthiest solution is to move out of the way and let it go.
The power of self-awareness can help us make an objective assessment of the situation and act based on clear thinking, rather than harmful negative emotions.
Finally, we can enhance our bodies’ capacity to resist stress by eating healthy food, exercising regularly, doing fun things and practicing relaxation techniques such as meditation and yoga.
You cannot prevent harmful stress by changing the world to be less stressful. You can only do it by changing your mind to be more detached and objective.
Copyright© By Amira Elgan. All Rights Reserved.
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